Here we go again...

Today (2011-11-08) on The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) [1]:

"Currently, the CRAN package repository features 5001 available packages."

Going from 4000 to 5000 packages took 14.5 months - that's one new package
every 10.5 hours. Behind every package there are real people. These
user-contributed packages are maintained by ~2900 people [2] - that's 350
new maintainers and many more contributors. More people to thank than ever
before - don't forget about them, e.g. cite properly when publishing.

Milestones:

2013-11-08: 5000 packages [this post]
2012-08-23: 4000 packages [7]
2011-05-12: 3000 packages [6]
2009-10-04: 2000 packages [5]
2007-04-12: 1000 packages [4]
2004-10-01: 500 packages [3,4]
2003-04-01: 250 packages [3,4]

[1] http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/
[2] http://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_summary_by_maintainer.html
[3] Private data.
[4] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2007-April/045359.html
[5] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2009-October/055049.html
[6] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2011-May/061002.html
[7] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2012-August/064675.html

/Henrik

PS. These data are for CRAN only. There are more packages elsewhere, e.g.
R-Forge, Bioconductor, Github etc.

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